Women & Housing Rights

COHRE believes that the promotion and protection of women’s right to housing is essential to women’s well-being and will only become increasingly important this century. As the primary users of housing, women often have the most at stake when possible eviction looms, and women also have very particular housing requirements. Beyond basic shelter needs, for many women housing is a place of employment and social interaction, and a place to care for children. The many ways housing rights can protect women’s rights are included in COHRE’s Sources 5 Women and Housing Rights, available in our library section.

Despite the obvious importance and significance of housing rights to the overall enjoyment of women’s rights, women often face discrimination in many aspects of housing. This can occur in terms of policy development, control over household resources, rights of inheritance and ownership, community organizing or even the construction of housing.

It is difficult to provide a global overview of the key housing rights challenges facing women, for many of these issues vary depending on the region or country. While recognizing the multiplicity of issues confronting women, the overriding feature of women’s relationship to housing is women’s lack of security of tenure. There are a number of ways in which security of tenure can be denied to women including gender-biased law, customary laws, tradition and dominant social attitudes, domestic violence and financial barriers. Each of these can threaten women’s security of tenure by preventing women from owning, inheriting, leasing, renting or remaining in housing and on land so that at any time a woman can be forced to leave her home and vacate her lands. Security of tenure - or lack thereof - is particularly relevant to women, as household economic security often rests on women’s shoulders. Despite the need for security of tenure, women’s overall social and economic disadvantage and inequality and the frequent exclusion of women from many vital aspects of the housing process has left women across the world lacking security of tenure. In fact, in some parts of the world being a woman guarantees insecure tenure.

The United Nations human rights system has started to take notice of the importance of these issues to women by adopting a number of human rights resolutions designed to strengthen women’s housing rights. These are important tools in the struggle for women’s housing rights and should be used in conjunction with all of the other legal resources legal recourses subsection pertaining to housing rights found on this site. The key UN web links to resolutions pertaining to women’s housing rights are:

Commission on Human Rights, Resolution 2000/13, Women’s equal ownership of, access to and control over land and the equal rights to own property and to adequate housing

Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights, Resolution 1999/15, Women and the right to development (1999)

Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights, Women and the right to land, property, and adequate housing (1998)

Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights, Women and the right to adequate housing and to land and property (1997)

Commission on the Status of Women Resolution 42/1 Human rights and land rights discrimination (1998)

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